Sameer Rahim reports from the Man Booker Prize dinner, which took place at
London's Guildhall last night.

As I entered the bowels of the Guildhall for the Man Booker Prize dinner, there was no escaping his plump, butcher's face. Henry VIII and the Barber Surgeons, which hangs on a wall near the cloakroom, was painted by Hans Holbein around 1540. That's around the time Hilary Mantel's extraordinary trilogy of novels about the king's right-hand-man Thomas Cromwell, which began with the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall in 2009 and continued with the Man Booker-winning Bring Up the Bodies last night, will finally end: by then Cromwell had fallen from grace and been executed.

During the dinner all the discussion was about whether the judges could dare give it to Mantel once more and for a novel in the same series – something unprecedented in Booker history. There was plenty of support for the other books on the shortlist as well. Ben Okri, winner for The Famished Road in 1990, told me that he loved the poetic beauty of Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists. I overheard one former Booker judge go into raptures over Alison Moore's The Lighthouse. Sophie Lewis, editor-at-large of the small publishing house And Other Stories, had flown in from Rio to support her author Deborah Levy's Swimming Home. Will Self's Umbrella divided opinion: some thought it a masterpiece, others couldn't get past the first page. Someone else hadn't read his books but recognised him from Shooting Stars.

This year has been regarded as the “experimental” or “highbrow” year in comparison to last year’s apparent collection of easy reads. But just how wrongheaded those definitions are was brought home to me when the person sitting to my left said that she had finally read all the books on the shortlist after trying every time for the last 11 years. Bad writing is hard to read and good writing, if not necessarily easy, is certainly more worth the effort.

When the chair of the judges Sir Peter Stothard announced that Hilary Mantel had the prize time there was an audible well of approval from the audience. “You wait 20 years for the Booker Prize and two come along at once,” said Mantel, but unlike some other winners’ speeches in recent years there was no hint of haughtiness. She has an appealing otherworldliness about her. As if the world of prizes and interviews is far less interesting than the fictional one she has created.Which of course it is.

One of the judges told me that Bring Up the Bodies was in a tradition of “mythopoetic Englishness”. I said that I could not remember a modern novel whose author clearly took so much pleasure in its creation.

Holbein apparently painted Henry VIII and the Barber Surgeons with only reference to older sketches; by that time Henry would not sit for him and in any case the king was more interested in presenting himself as an iconic monarch rather than a real person. Mantel's extraordinary achievement has been to animate that image as a convincingly insecure, tender (the cast-off Katherine recalls that he once gave her "six dozen roses made of the purest white silk") and violent man served by the ruthlessly progressive enforcer Cromwell. When she accepted her prize, Mantel was modest enough to say she did not expect to be standing on the podium when the third volume is published. But I wouldn't bet against it.